Laura Wexler
Author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America
About the Author
Laura Wexler is associate professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale University.
Works by Laura Wexler
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I'd recommend this one to anyone interested in race relations, civil rights, etc.... I see it as an important piece of US history regarding racial hate. The book provides a lot of info about elections/voting, political lobbying to try to enact federal anti-lynching laws, state & federal justice systems during those time periods, as well as the beginnings of civil rights advances under President Truman. I also learned that lynchings are not just by rope (I always thought of them that way), show more but are any kind of vigilante killing by a group/mob. (In this case, the four victims were killed by being shot.) I also learned that as of 2003 (when the book came out), there has never been a federal anti-lynching law that was passed. (Apparently, in 2005, the Senate passed a resolution expressing remorse that they never did pass a federal anti-lynching law.)
In retrospect, I should have used post-its to mark pages as there were things I wanted to remember or comment on & now have no idea where they are in the book.
I'm going to try to flip through & pull out a couple of pieces...
In 1946 Eugene Talmadge & James Carmichael were running against each other for the Governor's seat. At that time, Georgia had a "county unit" system not too unlike the electoral college. So, even though Carmichael (the less conservative of the two men) won the popular vote by more than 16k votes, Talmadge (basically a white supremacist) won the actual post because of the "county unit" system.
Apparently, after lynchings, it was quite popular for crowds to show up to look for lynching souvenirs... pieces of rope or bullets, body parts, clothing, anything. Taking photos was also popular (especially if the bodies were still there, which was fortunately not the case here as they had been picked up by a funeral home the evening it happened).
and
During the funerals for the four victims, few attended, many out of fear of reprisal for attending or for 'seeming to know or consort with' those who had been killed. George & Mae Murray Dorsey were siblings & their mom missed their funeral because she couldn't easily find a ride for hours (others were too scared to take her -- one man had anticipated he'd be asked for a ride so he "broke" his car himself prior to being asked; another man agreed, then went & got so drunk that he couldn't drive, thereby giving himself an "out" also).
The FBI investigated & a federal grand jury was even convened (even though there was no federal anti-lynching law, there was so much national attention on this case that the FBI was trying to get info & a case based on some more "minor" federal offenses), but the case remains unsolved to this day due to the wall of silence by so many in Walton county -- those guilty, complicit, or too scared/dependent on staying in the community to talk.
As far as furthering the national conversation about civil rights...
and
From the Author's Note at the end of the book...
and
Wise & still accurate words, I think, 15 years after this book was published. show less
In retrospect, I should have used post-its to mark pages as there were things I wanted to remember or comment on & now have no idea where they are in the book.
I'm going to try to flip through & pull out a couple of pieces...
In 1946 Eugene Talmadge & James Carmichael were running against each other for the Governor's seat. At that time, Georgia had a "county unit" system not too unlike the electoral college. So, even though Carmichael (the less conservative of the two men) won the popular vote by more than 16k votes, Talmadge (basically a white supremacist) won the actual post because of the "county unit" system.
Apparently, after lynchings, it was quite popular for crowds to show up to look for lynching souvenirs... pieces of rope or bullets, body parts, clothing, anything. Taking photos was also popular (especially if the bodies were still there, which was fortunately not the case here as they had been picked up by a funeral home the evening it happened).
"On this Friday morning in 1946, there was no chance of collecting a finger, a penis, or even a photograph of the lynching victims' battered bodies, as they'd been transported to Monroe late the evening before. Yet the souvenir collectors came nonetheless, fueled by the hope of finding a memento or a talisman, anything that could connect them to what they saw as the excitement and drama -- if not the horror -- of the quadruple murder."
and
"What they didn't consider, however, was that the men who'd killed Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray Dorsey, had committed a murder so extreme that it would become an icon of postwar violence, a symbol of the chasm between the promise of democracy and the reality of life for black people in America in 1946. What they couldn't predict was that the men who fired the shots at Moore's Ford had made history; the nation would never again see as many victims lynched on a single day after July 25, 1946."
During the funerals for the four victims, few attended, many out of fear of reprisal for attending or for 'seeming to know or consort with' those who had been killed. George & Mae Murray Dorsey were siblings & their mom missed their funeral because she couldn't easily find a ride for hours (others were too scared to take her -- one man had anticipated he'd be asked for a ride so he "broke" his car himself prior to being asked; another man agreed, then went & got so drunk that he couldn't drive, thereby giving himself an "out" also).
The FBI investigated & a federal grand jury was even convened (even though there was no federal anti-lynching law, there was so much national attention on this case that the FBI was trying to get info & a case based on some more "minor" federal offenses), but the case remains unsolved to this day due to the wall of silence by so many in Walton county -- those guilty, complicit, or too scared/dependent on staying in the community to talk.
"The efforts of the federal government, ultimately, were no match for a jury selected from a white community that didn't view attacks on black people as crimes. That had been proven with the Verners' trials, as it had been proven one month before in Greenville, South Carolina, when a local jury had found thirty-one white men charged with lynching a black man named Willie Earle not guilty -- even though twenty-six of those men had admitted to the FBI that they'd been members of the lynch mob."
As far as furthering the national conversation about civil rights...
"The crime had now gone unpunished. And yet Walter White and his liberal allies took comfort, because nearly four weeks after the federal government failed to win convictions against the Verner brothers, an American president addressed the NAACP's annual conference for the first time in history. "I should like to talk to you about civil rights and human freedom," President Truman said as he stood at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial on June 29, 1947.""
and
"Four months after Truman's June address to the NAACP, the President's Committee on Civil Rights issued a report containing nearly three dozen recommendations for improving the state of civil rights in America. When, on February 2, 1948, President Truman sent a special message to Congress asking it to enact several of the report's recommendations, he became the first American president to put civil rights at the forefront of the national agenda."
From the Author's Note at the end of the book...
"My conversations with the white people who did consent to being interviewed were essential to my understanding of the lynching -- less for the information they supplied than for the way they revealed how segregated the memory of the Moore's Ford lynching remains. This segregation is evident in the opposing beliefs about the lynching's victims and villains, and about its very causation. But it's evident most starkly in the different meanings and significances attributed to the lynching. For many black people, the lynching was the most horrific thing that ever happened in Walton or Oconee counties, but for many white people, it was mainly an annoyance, an event that smudged the area's good name."
and
"And the segregated memories of the Moore's Ford lynching reveal something basic: The only way for blacks and whites to live together peacefully in America in the twenty-first century is if we begin struggling to understand and acknowledge the extent to which racism has destroyed -- and continues to destroy -- our ability to tell a common truth.
When I began this project, I had hoped to solve the murders, hoped for prosecution of the lynchers. But now, after years of investigation, I believe we'll never know who fired the shots in the clearing near the Moore's Ford Bridge on July 25, 1946. And I wonder if that unanswered question, that hole where the center should be, isn't the truest representation of race in America."
Wise & still accurate words, I think, 15 years after this book was published. show less
Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Cultural Studies of the United States) by Laura Wexler
In Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism, Laura Wexler believes “the first cohort of American women photographers to achieve serious public careers as photojournalists at the turn of the century often used the ‘innocent eye’ attributed to them by white domestic sentiment to construct images of war as peace, images that were, in turn, a constitutive element of the social relations of United States imperialism during the era’s annexation and consolidation of show more colonies” (pg. 6). She continues, “In their work we can see that the constitutive sentimental functions of the innocent eye masked and distorted what otherwise must have been more apparent: hatred, fear, collusion, resistance, and mimicry on the part of the subaltern; compulsion, presumption, confusion, brutality, and soul murder on the part of the colonial agent” (pg. 7). Wexler primarily focuses on the photography of Frances Benjamin Johnston, though she does use a couple other woman photographers, writing, “One generally shared aspect of their efforts was the highly intimate side to the work of policing the boundaries of American domesticity, which many of the women seem to have experienced as internal contradiction” (pg. 11). Wexler draws upon the work of Gail Bederman, Judith Butler, and others.
Wexler uses Johnston’s photographs of Commodore George Dewey after the Battle of Manila as an introduction to her theories. She writes, “Domestic images may be – but need not be – representations of and for a so-called separate sphere of family life. Domestic images may also be configurations of familiar and intimate arrangements intended for the eyes of outsiders, the heimlich (private) as a kind of propaganda; or they may be metonymical references to unfamiliar arrangements, the unheimlich intended for domestic consumption. What matters is the use of the image to signify the domestic realm” (pg. 21). Wexler continues, “The cult of domesticity was a crucial framework for American imperialism in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, apologists for colonialism used conceptions of domestic progress as both a descriptive and a heuristic tool” (pg. 22). Further, Wexler considers “as domestic images several sets of late nineteenth-century American photographs that presented views of American daily life which resonated with, at the very least, and sometimes deliberately sought to amplify the voices of American imperialism” (pg. 22). In this way, “Domestic photography hoped to make the visible disappear. By definition, the imperial house of horrors was outside the frame” (pg. 35). Examining theory, Wexler writes, “Gender is, in effect, a delivery system for race and class distinctions, and the arousal of gender consciousness has to be taken also as a sign of other activations as well as those, or along with those, of sex” (pg. 42). Finally, “the use of gender as an analytical category in the study of photographic narrative, as a sign of many differences, not all of which are commensurate with one another or even synchronous with the story line” (pg. 47).
Of sentimentality, Wexler writes, “We must recognize in sentimental discourse that coded American domesticity as a benign or even a benevolent force, a compromise with or even a flirtation with the mechanics of racialized terror that kept a firm hold throughout the entire course of the nineteenth century” (pg. 53). In this way, “the culture of sentiment aimed not only to establish itself as the gatekeeper of social existence but at the same time to denigrate all other people whose style or conditions of domesticity did not conform to the sentimental model. Since the sentimental home was the model home, it followed that anyone else’s home was in need of reform” (pg. 67). Wexler writes, “What we learn of the past by looking at photographic documents like the Hampton album is not ‘the way things were,’ to use the essentializing phrase. Instead, what they show us of the past is a record of choices. What a photograph represents is a solution to a clash of forces that we must learn to see” (pg. 133). She continues, “The photographer’s mise en scène, her choice of group arrangements and camera angles, and the body language and self-presentation of the photographed subjects construct a submerged text that is analogous to the unconscious in Freudian theory, to maternal language in Kristevian semiotics, and to the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in the challenge it allows viewers to make to the dominant story” (pg. 153).
Wexler writes, “As a female artist in conflict with the strictures of her own position, striving to loosen her own bonds, Johnston seems unaware of an analogy, however tenuous, between her desire for freedom and theirs. The white, Victorian, unmarried woman artist was more conscious of being caught in a density of feminine proscriptions than was usual for other white Victorian women” (pg. 162-163). She continues, “In the context of late-nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism, middle-class white American women photographers, like earlier Euro-American women travel writers, mediated the politics of racial subjugation through what they felt, in accordance with the history of domestic sentimentalism, to be their prerogatives in looking” (pg. 177). Wexler concludes, “Photography has always been a constitutive force, not merely reflecting but actively determining the social spaces in which lives are lived. The narratives we make about domestic photographs, relating image to image and to other cultural forms, have helped to shape our current violent predicaments of race, class, and gender” (pg. 299). show less
Wexler uses Johnston’s photographs of Commodore George Dewey after the Battle of Manila as an introduction to her theories. She writes, “Domestic images may be – but need not be – representations of and for a so-called separate sphere of family life. Domestic images may also be configurations of familiar and intimate arrangements intended for the eyes of outsiders, the heimlich (private) as a kind of propaganda; or they may be metonymical references to unfamiliar arrangements, the unheimlich intended for domestic consumption. What matters is the use of the image to signify the domestic realm” (pg. 21). Wexler continues, “The cult of domesticity was a crucial framework for American imperialism in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, apologists for colonialism used conceptions of domestic progress as both a descriptive and a heuristic tool” (pg. 22). Further, Wexler considers “as domestic images several sets of late nineteenth-century American photographs that presented views of American daily life which resonated with, at the very least, and sometimes deliberately sought to amplify the voices of American imperialism” (pg. 22). In this way, “Domestic photography hoped to make the visible disappear. By definition, the imperial house of horrors was outside the frame” (pg. 35). Examining theory, Wexler writes, “Gender is, in effect, a delivery system for race and class distinctions, and the arousal of gender consciousness has to be taken also as a sign of other activations as well as those, or along with those, of sex” (pg. 42). Finally, “the use of gender as an analytical category in the study of photographic narrative, as a sign of many differences, not all of which are commensurate with one another or even synchronous with the story line” (pg. 47).
Of sentimentality, Wexler writes, “We must recognize in sentimental discourse that coded American domesticity as a benign or even a benevolent force, a compromise with or even a flirtation with the mechanics of racialized terror that kept a firm hold throughout the entire course of the nineteenth century” (pg. 53). In this way, “the culture of sentiment aimed not only to establish itself as the gatekeeper of social existence but at the same time to denigrate all other people whose style or conditions of domesticity did not conform to the sentimental model. Since the sentimental home was the model home, it followed that anyone else’s home was in need of reform” (pg. 67). Wexler writes, “What we learn of the past by looking at photographic documents like the Hampton album is not ‘the way things were,’ to use the essentializing phrase. Instead, what they show us of the past is a record of choices. What a photograph represents is a solution to a clash of forces that we must learn to see” (pg. 133). She continues, “The photographer’s mise en scène, her choice of group arrangements and camera angles, and the body language and self-presentation of the photographed subjects construct a submerged text that is analogous to the unconscious in Freudian theory, to maternal language in Kristevian semiotics, and to the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in the challenge it allows viewers to make to the dominant story” (pg. 153).
Wexler writes, “As a female artist in conflict with the strictures of her own position, striving to loosen her own bonds, Johnston seems unaware of an analogy, however tenuous, between her desire for freedom and theirs. The white, Victorian, unmarried woman artist was more conscious of being caught in a density of feminine proscriptions than was usual for other white Victorian women” (pg. 162-163). She continues, “In the context of late-nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism, middle-class white American women photographers, like earlier Euro-American women travel writers, mediated the politics of racial subjugation through what they felt, in accordance with the history of domestic sentimentalism, to be their prerogatives in looking” (pg. 177). Wexler concludes, “Photography has always been a constitutive force, not merely reflecting but actively determining the social spaces in which lives are lived. The narratives we make about domestic photographs, relating image to image and to other cultural forms, have helped to shape our current violent predicaments of race, class, and gender” (pg. 299). show less
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